Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak” (SHEG report, p.4).
We make plenty of assumptions about digital natives; however, the results of a study undertaken by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), demonstrated a consistent lack of digital literacy skills among students. Middle school students had difficulty distinguishing an ad from a new story, high school students did not notice that a chart about gun laws came from a gun owners’ political group, and college students tended not to look behind a .org URL to find out who was behind a website presenting a contentious point of view about children’s health.
The study tested 7,804 students across Middle School, High School and College on their civic online reasoning ability. This is the “ability to judge the credibility of information that floods young people’s smartphones, tablets, and computers” (p.3). This is information literacy, focused specifically on the online world.
Snapshot of lessons and assessments for civic online reasoning from SHEG.
One key assumption we tend to make about digital natives is that they are naturally skilled at navigating digital content and tools, and that this mastery is transferrable (Frawley, 2017). Such a stereotype fails to recognise the variations in skills and experiences of ‘digital natives’. This could lead to detrimental student outcomes if we assume students have skills that they in fact don’t.
The findings of the SHEG study align with other studies about information search tendencies of members of the ‘Google Generation’:
- unwillingness to evaluate information deeply or deal with uncertainties or nuances, evidenced by a tendency to
o search quickly
o latch onto the first items of information
o visit fewer pages and domains and
o undertake fewer searches
- greater concern with finding ‘an’ answer than with quality, validity or authority of web sources (Taylor, 2012).
- a pattern of operating at the surface level of information searching online, “sacrificing depth for breadth” (Nicholas et al, 2011, p. 44).
In an age where anyone can be a publisher, content creators can push their own agenda unchecked, and consumers of content are bombarded with information overload. The need to be able to look deeply, check facts and identify bias is more important than ever. The SHEG study expressed concern at the “ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish”. (p.5).
The researchers have generously made the assessment instruments from their study publicly available. We were interested to see how our students would fare on some of the tasks, so we tried it out with year 8 English students who were learning about advertising. We won’t publish the results, but needless to say, the student responses were illuminating, indicating new pedagogical directions around digital and information literacy skills for our students. We would highly recommend this resource to schools wanting to get a gauge for the online information literacy of their students. The toolkit can be accessed here, and contains test items and rubrics in both PDF and GoogleDoc formats.
References:
Frawley, J. (2017). The myth of the ‘digital native’. Retrieved from: https://sydney.edu.au/education-portfolio/ei/teaching@sydney/digital-native-myth/
Nicholas, D., Rowlands, D., Clark, D., & Williams, P. (2011). Google Generation II: web behaviour experiments with the BBC. ASLIB Proceedings, 63(1). https://doi.org/10.1108/0001253111110376
Stanford History Education Group (SHEG). (2019). Civic Online Reasoning [lessons and assessment]. Retrieved on 8 November 2019 from https://sheg.stanford.edu/civic-online-reasoning?page=1#main-content
Stanford History Education Group (SHEG). (2016). Evaluating information: the cornerstone of civic online reasoning. Retrieved on 8 November 2019 from https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:fv751yt5934/SHEG%20Evaluating%20Information%20Online.pdf
Taylor, A. (2012). A study of the information search behaviour of the millennial generation. Information Research, 17(1). https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ971949
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